If we're going to terraform Mars, why mess around? Let's smash our moon in it. That would heat it up quickly?

Question

It would end up a bigger planet, more like the Earth. Good idea?

How would we move the moon to a Mars collision? Easy: Gently quide asteroids and comets close to the moon, to pull it out of orbit and into the path to Mars. Child's play.

Our moon is a dead, boring body anyway. Let's play God!

Actually this would take a very long time, at least thousands of years. But once it got there, the fireworks would be interesting to say the least!

Answer 1

First, the moon is massive. Even your suggestion of slowly quide it with small bits of rock and ice would barely shove it off orbit. As you said, it could take thousands of years. We can project that we can terraform Mars in several tens or few hundreds of years. So WHY MESS AROUND?

Even if we somehow get it off its orbit, we would not want to remove the moon from its orbit, even if it was "boring" (it's not to me)

The moon is the biggest part of the system that stabilizes the earth's rotation. Keep in mind that the earth's climate is very sensitive to small changes in the axis tilt (The Sahara desert was creted by less than 1 deree shift). Withouth the moon, the earth's climate would soon be too harsh for us.

Also, other planets that have relatively small moons or no moons at all are stable because they have kept their status for several billion years. If the earth lost the moon, then the system is disrupted, and the earth's rotation goes heywire.

Finally, even if we were to survive such a drastic change in the system, the Moon would still eventually crash-land on Mrs. Sure, heat may be generated, but the impact will cause so much energy it will make the red planet more inhospitable than it is now, or totally destroy it by the force of the impact. (The thing that killed off the dinosaurs, by sending a portion of the Earth's crust into the atmosphere, was "ONLY" a mile and a half long. Impact with anything the size of the moon would rip Earth apart. How much more with a smaller planet?)

Answer 2

First of all, understand that Moon is a body attracted and kept with it by a Earth of mass
6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Kg. So there's no way that you would use petty asteroids to "pull away" moon out of earth's orbit. Maybe Technology gets advanced one day to "pull out" the moon, but then it would be also advance enough to Terra farm Mars at much lower costs.

Answer 3

The problem of warmth for the colonists must have simpler solutions than this, Helium 3 fusion devices using helium 3 mined on the moon may become practical.

But the real problem is Mars keeping its atmosphere once you have solved terraforming that and the distortions on its orbit produced by Jupiter's gravitational pull

So it needs a global solution to ALL the terraforming issues not a crude attempt to solve one of them by brute force.

Answer 4

Hey, in principle, your idea is as good as any.

In practice, I sense you are already aware it would be tough to do, but I will play along anyway.

We have never guided anything bigger than a rocket or satellite successfully, so guiding asteroids would take skills, money, energy, and science that were...well...astronomical. Even heating Mars doesn't gaurantee anything, since it will still sit too far from the sun to be functional for life as we know it without a lot of changes. And even then, you are looking at spending all of our money over the next 25 years to do it.

Answer 5

without the moon,earth. would be a "dead boring"body too.

Answer 6

WTF? Have you lost your mind, if we try and succeed, it smash into Mars and send it out of control, and then we could kiss our butts goodbye. That is a dumb idea